Master’s Thesis Public Administration Research question: How do ideas, through discourse, influence the adoption of workfare activation policies in different welfare states? Name: Maria K. Charles Student number: s0101745 Stream: Economics and Governance Thesis supervisor: Dr. Natascha van der Zwan Study year: 2017/2018 Date: 11th of June 2018 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................... 3 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1: Theoretical framework .................................................................................. 8 1.1 The development of the welfare state ................................................................... 8 1.2 A shift in thinking about the welfare state .......................................................... 11 1.3 The activation of the welfare state: from welfare to workfare ............................ 14 1.4 Convergence on activation policies .................................................................... 17 1.5 The role of ideas and its influence on social policymaking ................................ 19 Chapter 2: Research design and methods ..................................................................... 23 2.1 Problem definition and research design approach .............................................. 23 2.2 Conceptualization and operationalization of variables ....................................... 23 2.3 Case selection ..................................................................................................... 25 2.4 Data collection sources ....................................................................................... 27 2.5 Method of analysis .............................................................................................. 32 2.6 Addressing threats to inference ........................................................................... 34 Chapter 3: Findings ...................................................................................................... 36 3.1 The background environment ............................................................................. 36 3.2 Tracing the discourse .......................................................................................... 37 3.2.1 The United Kingdom – The New Deal for Young People ........................... 37 3.2.2 The Netherlands – Wet Inschakeling Werkzoekenden ................................ 44 Chapter 4: Analysis ...................................................................................................... 49 Chapter 5: Conclusion .................................................................................................. 51 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 53 Appendix ...................................................................................................................... 65 1 Question 1: What are the prevailing ideas? When can we first observe ideational influence, and how was this communicated? ....................................................................... 65 The United Kingdom ............................................................................................. 65 The Netherlands .................................................................................................... 68 Question 2: How have these ideas been translated into plans for national policy? .. 70 The United Kingdom ............................................................................................. 70 The Netherlands .................................................................................................... 72 Question 3: How was the discourse around the time of adoption? ........................... 75 The United Kingdom ............................................................................................. 75 The Netherlands .................................................................................................... 76 2 List of Abbreviations CDA Christen-Democratisch Appèl (Christian Democratic Appeal) D66 Democraten 66 (Democrats66) NYPD New Deal for Young People PvdA Partij van de Arbeid (Labor Party) VVD Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (People's Party for Freedom and Democracy) WIW Wet Inschakeling Werkzoenden (Job seekers’ activation law) 3 Introduction Welfare states remains a popular subject for study among scholars, with much emphasis on its evolution over the years. This master’s thesis deals with the role of ideas, measured through discourse, and the role it plays in one aspect of welfare state development. Macroeconomic forces pressure politicians to implement social policies (expanding or retrenching the welfare state) which may contrast their institutional past. In the 1990s, governments struggled to cope with the consequences of the aging population and early retirements (Walters, 1997), the increased demand from welfare recipients for social protection (Allen, Cook, Mitchell, & Watts, 2007), changes in the labor market with the decrease in demand for production based workers and increase in demand of knowledge/service-based workers (Iversen & Wren, 1998), and high unemployment as a result of the economic crisis of the 1980s (Cook, 2008). The former protective welfare state where social benefits were provided as a supplement to individual’s income was no longer sustainable. So a new way of thinking about the welfare state evolved. A new strategy called the social investment strategy, under the Third Way thinking, was introduced in many European countries (Van Kersbergen & Hemerijck, 2012). Social benefits were used as an incentive to get individual to work (Cox, 1998). This was the dawn of the activation era. Under this new way of thinking, benefit recipients were encouraged and empowered to find jobs, on the one hand, and obliged to keep these jobs, on the other (Barbier & Ludwig-Mayerhofer, 2004). Over the years, there has been a shift to adopt stricter approaches as it regards active labor market policies (Vis, 2007). This stricter approach is referred to as workfare. Simply put, this is social benefits in exchange for (testable) job search efforts (Dingeldey, 2007). Welfare regime types came to the forefront in academic literature particularly because of the work of Gøsta Esping-Andersen, who typified three forms of welfare states: the Liberal, Social-Democratic and Corporatist (Esping-Andersen, 1990). In keeping with this work, Barbier & Ludwig-Mayerhofer (2004) also identified welfare states according to their level of activation: the liberal and universal activation regimes. These various regime types are characterized by distinct ideologies on welfare which shape social policies (Arts & Gelissen, 2002; Esping-Andersen, 1990). Ideally, one would expect different responses from countries of different welfare regime types, as it is believed that different sets of ideas cause decision makers to act differently in the same circumstance (Hay, 2002). However, we see governments across Europe implementing workfare activation policies (Vis, 2007). This is puzzling because I 4 reason that the workfare approach is a better fit within the liberal activation type because of their focus on re-commodification (Mascini, Soentken, & Van der Veen, 2012). What’s more, a country characterized as having a universalistic activation welfare regime, should theoretically embrace decommodification and therefore not favor the workfare approach. If the ideology or way of thinking about the welfare state shapes social reform, then before a welfare policy reform happens there should also be a change in the thinking (Blyth, 1997; Hay, 2002). According to Vivien Schmidt (2002), a leading proponent of discursive institutionalism, ideas (which according to her are measured through discourse) has a superior propensity to provide a richer account of changes in the welfare state when put together with other forms of institutionalism. If this is to be believed, then we could look at the discourse surrounding a social reform to describe how ideas can influence a policy. According to Schmidt (2002), ideas, through discourse, can be measured by looking at the coordinative, i.e.: discourse among political actors, and communicative discourse, i.e.: discourse to the public, which is essentially whatever politicians communicate to fellow political actors and to the general public in order to create and justify their ideas. This is essentially framing, or in other words choosing to portray something in a particular so as to create classifications in the minds of people (Stone, 2012). Politicians frame their ideas in such a way so that it is normatively and cognitively acceptable to their peer and the public (Schmidt, 2002). So in essence, I assumed that by looking at the framing of a social policy, I would be able to show the strategies used to gain acceptance for a policy. Other studies have focused on the demonstrating the causal link between ideas and politics in general (for an account of different views see Béland & Cox 2011; Schmidt & Radaelli, 2004, welfare state adjustment from an economic perspective (Schmidt, 2002), and the development of activation policies (Weishaupt, 2011). However, I want to look specifically at the framing of ideas, and how this influenced the adoption of workfare policies in different welfare states